Foreign Characters - Virus?

[Guest]

Hi - attempting to help a neighbor out. Her computer appears to have some
virus of some type. All text (Desktop & Startup ICONs, Application Title
Bars, etc.) is in foreign charcters (of some origin or another - could
possibly be the wingding font). She brought it in to be serviced (as a result
of the characters) but when she brought it home her account/profile was
corrected but her two children's profiles were still uncorrected. So I
deleted the two 'corrupt' profiles/accounts and we then ran Mcafee, Adaware.
Nothing of significance was found - some tracking cookies was all. Next, I
loaded Windows SP 2 and after a restart - her profile seemed to go back to
foreign characters with some minor differences - namely resolution seemed to
be smaller and some text - such as 'Start up' application titles, etc was in
English characters. But definitely the tite bars of any application (top
title bars) e.g. IE, Quicken. were still in foreign characters. Any
help/direction would be appreciated.

 

[Guest]

Try chaning the fonts in the 'Display Properties' | 'Appearance' tab |
'Advanced'.
It is possible that some fonts were deleted, corrupted or even replaced by
an application or a virus.

 

[Guest]

Cool - I'll try the below out and report back. Would the 'font change' (to
wingdings or whatever) affect the resolution - because when we restarted the
computer after I installed Windows SP2 patch - the resolution seemed smaller
and whatever window that we launched (such as 'display properties') seemed
squished (sp?) (technical term I know) a bit.

Thanks

 

[Guest]

For your resolution problem update the video drivers for thr Vid card with a
compatable SP2 driver.
http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_device_drivers.htm

 

[Guest]

Thanks, as this pointed me in the right direction - went to Control Panel -
Appearance & Themes - Fonts and chose a known Font. Immediately corrected.
Not sure how my neighbor changed settings but it is corrected now - thank you
so much!!

Darby

 

[Guest]

Also one other issue with her computer that we're attempting to tackle. Each
time the computer boots up ( with normal shut-down protocol followed) an
error type (black) screen message is displayed. I won't type out the whole
error msg., but briefly it is more or less:

We apologize for the inconvenience, but Windows did not start successfully...

(The error msg. then go on to list the following values to choose from

Safte Mode
Safe Mode with Networking
Safe Mode with Command Prompt

( and than some other verbiage followed by: )

Start Windows Normally (highlighted by default)

It then has a count down and then starts Windows as it normally would. This
is repeated every time a reboot ocurrs. Any ideas as to how to get rid of
the above error screen?

Thanks